


I Like to Know You're There, Though There's Nothing Left to Say

by oppressa



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Communication Breakdown, F/M, Horrible Awful Angst sorry, Relationship Conflict, Seeking Attention, emotional distress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-22
Updated: 2015-04-22
Packaged: 2018-03-25 03:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 663
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3795451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oppressa/pseuds/oppressa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After his failure at the walls of Paris, Floki tries to get Helga back on his side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Like to Know You're There, Though There's Nothing Left to Say

Ragnar's precious priest is dead, if anything Floki's axe killed him in the way he would have chosen, with disgusting submission. Ragnar can't know that, still Ragnar cannot seem to forget him and nor can Helga. He's had his disagreements with Ragnar over the years, about many things, but Helga is meant to be on his side. He would tell her anything, confident she'd never turn away, unless he wanted to be left alone, and then even if she didn't understand it, she would leave him be. He doesn't want to be alone here, though. It's been quiet inside his head since his towers burned around him, the gods don't talk to him any more. He needs his sweet Helga to hold him, to let him tremble in her arms. Instead she just shuns him, in this woodland which isn't their old home. Resentfully, he thinks she has nowhere else to go.

He sees her moving in between the trees, like the huldra he thought she was when he first saw her, and followed her through the forest outside Kattegat. Floki's never known what's good for him yet Helga _was_ , she wasn't a trick, she was the best thing that ever happened to him.

“Don't come near me.” She says now, and it hurts his ears to hear it.

“Helga, please.”

“No, Floki, not now.”

“ _Then when can I?_ ” He screams at her, his voice causing the birds to take flight, and she looks back. He drops on his knees. If she wants to see him ruined, he'll show her though she already saw it. There's no way he can be more wretched than that.

“I don't know.”

He closes his eyes, and only realises she has come to him after all when he feels her softly petting his hair. He quickly catches her hand, presses it against his cheek, she might recoil slightly but she doesn't pull it away and he doesn't even care with the familiar contact of her fingers in his. 

Her thumb brushes his lips, gently, (his mouth that is full of lies). Then she whispers, “I can't stop thinking about what you did.”

It makes him want to throw up although he hasn't eaten since the night before the attack. “Why should you, you had nothing to do with it. It was the gods, Helga, they spoke to me, they demanded it.”

“You never liked him.” She says, as if she didn't hear him invoke the gods as his motivators. “Athelstan tried his hardest for us, and you never gave him a chance.”

He spits on the ground, angry again, at her and himself and Ragnar and at that accursed, dead Christian who doesn't fade in any of their memories.

“Tell Ragnar, then, if it's something I did, tell him it was me and I would die and you would be happy.”

She pulls her hand back, frightened by him and afraid of Ragnar. “No, I would not, and what's to say he wouldn't kill me too, in his rage? Then your daughter would have no one, Floki. Don't you even think of her?”

 _Yes_ , he thinks of Angrboda, yes he adores her, but he doesn't see why he should always talk about it, the way Helga does. He squirms away from her, and lets her go, this time, stays silent as she leaves.

So he sits shivering, thinking about what he must have done wrong, senses her hovering, and maybe if he waits her out, she'll take pity on him. She wishes he hadn't done what he did, that means she still loves him despite it. But she keeps her distance as if she feels guilty, when Ragnar comes to inform him heavily they are trying again, to take the city with a different plan, and makes him feel even worse. It's as if she thinks, for all the trust he has gone back to placing in him since he killed the priest, that Ragnar somehow knows.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from a Lucero song that's like my excuse for writing this as well.
> 
> Huldra is a myth associated with Christianity according to lol, Wikipedia, but I still think of it every time I see Helga in the trees so I put it in as one of Floki's ~~flights of imagination~~ things he sincerely believes, even though to him it might actually be sacrilege to think that of her. Or something.


End file.
